Bates has visited British schools nearly every week since founding the Everyday Sexism Project in 2012, and rather disconcertingly has noticed of late that some boys have begun to espouse Red Pill ideas gleaned from the manosphere.
Even the communities that make up the manosphere appear to have grown more extreme in recent years. There was always a dark side to the “seduction community”. It came marinated in assumptions that women were overly emotional and naturally duplicitous. But geeky men venturing out onto Sunset Boulevard in top hats and feather boas (peacocking) with pocketbooks full of canned conversation starters — “Who lies more, men or women?” — seems quaint compared to what came later. Today the pickup community is marinated in Red Pill ideology, partly as a result of YouTube and its polarising algorithm. In the years after The Game was published, Erik Von Markovic (AKA Mystery) with his cheesy magic tricks was replaced by characters like Roosh V (real name Daryush Valizadeh) who writes that “My default opinion of any girl I meet is ‘worthless dirty whore until proven otherwise’”.
Bates frequently compares the incel movement to other violent extremists such as Jihadis. In the study of extremist movements there is a careful line to tread between condemning the ideology while examining what attracts people to it in the first place. As with incels, violent Islamist movements are characterised by a pathological hatred of women. In recruiting new adherents, jihadists often target deracinated second-generation migrants, feeding them a story of domestic prejudice, rampant promiscuity and imperialist western interventions in the Middle East.
Similarly, it is important to ask why young men are being drawn to incel ideology. The internet is one reason, as is the lingering societal assumption that men have a God-given right to sex. Yet paradoxically for someone of the Left, Bates echoes uncompromising War on Terror rhetoric when she writes about incel radicalisation. “I am not particularly interested in a ‘redemptive’ narrative for incels,” Bates writes. “What incel beliefs… are actually about is terrorism”.
But surely it’s pertinent to ask why there has been a rapid rise in the number of angry, sexless men in the early twenty-first century? Since 2008 the number of American men under 30 reporting no sex has nearly tripled. Bates makes no mention of this, nor of the increasingly winner-takes-all sexual marketplace generated by the retreat of monogamous norms and an increasingly polygynous, app-dominated hookup culture. While it’s important not to slip into victim-blaming rhetoric that sees the problem as women’s sexual freedom, the challenges facing unattractive, low-status men seem hardly to register on Bates’s radar.
Similarly, there is little examination of what drew men to the ‘seduction community’ in its heyday. Misogynists who wished to assert tyrannical power over women were certainly ubiquitous in the genre, as Bates makes clear. “Instead of being open to women’s feelings and needs, acolytes are taught to ignore and deny them,” she writes. Yet it is obvious from the testimonies of some who gravitated towards pickup forums — often after typing a banal cry for help such as “how to get a girlfriend?” into a search engine — that many had grown frustrated with useless mainstream advice to “just be yourself”. Men are expected to just know how to conduct themselves during courtship and many don’t. Moreover, dating is often paradoxical: what people say they want in a prospective partner is often different from what they emotionally respond to.
The manosphere encourages men to be uncompromising emotional robots. As Bates convincingly demonstrates, this is immensely damaging to women. It also produces emotionally stunted men. “When feminists talk about ‘toxic masculinity’ we mean the enormous potential damage posed by an outdated version of what it means to be a man,” writes Bates. Those attempting to reanimate a rigid, dogmatic version of manhood for the 21st century confuse force with strength. They also come across as overcompensating for deeper insecurities: see US President Donald Trump bombastically playing down his COVID-19 infection.
Yet Bates seems to approach the topic of masculinity from an assumption that gender is entirely socially constructed. I’m not sure this — sometimes referred to as the blank slate — is helpful. Bewilderingly, she lists “strength”, “physical prowess” and the pursuit of “money and status” as examples of “toxic masculinity”.
There are certainly toxic incarnations of all of the above. However, it seems unlikely that men try to cultivate athletic physiques and pursue power and status entirely as a result of brainwashing by western capitalist patriarchy. Every man from high school age up knows that masculine, high-status men receive the greater share of attention from women. Moreover, outside of the rarefied ideological bubble of the social sciences it is widely accepted that this is partly a product of millions of years of evolution and sexual selection. As the Mary Harrington writes for UnHerd: “Females in sexually dimorphic species don’t choose mates at random but select for traits that will give their offspring an advantage of some kind.”
A similar point was made (albeit in a more humorous manner) in Grayson Perry’s recent and well-received critique of contemporary masculinity, The Descent of Man:
“When I talked to a women’s therapy group, several members bemoaned the lack of real ‘manly’ men in middle-class circles these days. But when I quizzed them about this, they admitted that they only wanted him in the bedroom department; the rest of the time they wanted a nice sensitive chap who would clean out the cat litter without being asked. Good luck with that.”
Despite Perry’s scepticism, this really isn’t too much for women to expect from men. The manosphere won’t like it — housework is for “cucks” after all. But it also runs against fashionable notions — regrettably espoused by Bates who dismisses everything which hints at gender being partly a product of evolved preferences as “pseudo-science” — that we can do away with masculinity in toto.
Harmful gender stereotypes abound and it is important to combat them. But assuming masculinity will fade away — to be replaced by some genderless utopia — is no more plausible than the Marxist belief that greed and avarice will vanish once the state takes over the means of production. It simply flies in the face of masses of empirical, cross-cultural evidence. Perhaps more pertinently, it also contradicts the lived experience of the majority of men, which in turn helps fuel the resentful grievances of the manosphere.
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Subscribe“But surely it’s pertinent to ask why there has been a rapid rise in the number of angry, sexless men in the early twenty-first century?”
You’ve answered your own question:
Because “the challenges facing unattractive, low-status men seem hardly to register on Bates’s radar.”
Bates is a white, wealthy, middle-class, home counties girl who has probably never been further north than her university town. Nothing wrong with any of that, but it is a world away from the lives
of young lads in terraced houses from Salford or Stoke-on-Trent.
I doubt these people read Unherd or attend her Tet seminars”¦
Again, why there has been a rapid rise in the number of angry, sexless men in the early twenty-first century?
“¢Because they can’t get jobs that give them status or satisfaction. This feeds through into feelings of inadequacy and depression, which feeds the suicide rate ““ the highest levels of which are recorded amongst young men aged 25-49.
“¢Because the world of work has been feminised and there are so few male roles as well as male role modes for these young men to follow.
“¢Because the jobs in manufacturing, adventuring, the military, exploration, mining, ship and car manufacturing, iron and steel, as well as the everyday and affiliated trades such as carpenters, electricians, plumbers, builders and heavy machine operatives have all disappeared or are regarded with contempt.
“¢Because the lives of millions of such men are not thought about or reported on by white, middle-class academics who know nothing of the world outside.
“¢Because to be a working class male (of any colour) is the worst possible socio-economic and moral category you can possibly belong to
“¢Because they wish to work with their hands which might create useful products instead of writing pointless, subjective articles and their responses like these.
“¢Because ‘chav’ is the one insult which can be hurled around at its target audience with impunity, because the intended recipients are not worthy of sympathy or respect.
“¢All of which leads to feelings of boredom, frustration and anger. It’s not the women men hate, it’s something deep inside them which isn’t being met. Regrettably and tragically they sometimes take it out on women, and have done since time began.
It may therefore be something deep within the male psyche which simply can’t be coached or brainwashed out of them, because the anger and frustration is forever bubbling beneath the surface
The modern world does not help, and neither does the unhelpful and insulting language used by commentators to describe this condition. Empathy is required on both sides – Laura Bates might bear that in mind when she writes her next book.
This was a well-written post, Ben. In particular your penultimate paragraph stuck out to me. I find most men and boys are resistant to change from without and will continue to resist even if such change is considered to be in their own best interests. Maybe that’s what lies at the root of masculinity: the power to resist conformity and find new ways to be outside prescribed spaces and controlled environments.
Great post.
Very well said. I believe a very important factor in bringing out the best in a man is to give him respect. I don’t know if this is a need deep in the male psyche as you put it or culturally conditioned but for many men(not all) it works.
After being abused by women since childhood, and up to 2010
when it finally stopped.(the sociopathic female finally died.)
I have been a loyal follower of the manosphere. and have NO
intention of stopping.I’m 69 years old.
Exactly right, Ben. Well done.
Here in the U.S., white, middle-aged working class men are dying in such numbers that our national life expectancy numbers are in decline. The deaths, dubbed “deaths of despair,” are largely self-inflicted: drugs, alcohol, and suicide. Referred to as “deplorables,” no one talks about them. No one cares.
God cares. This is injustice. Yes, we deplorables need to stop letting others (namely, Democrats) define us, and live our lives on our own terms. Our government needs some correction so we can do this without being further exploited and manipulated by a system that continually takes from us, and gives it away to others.
Well said Ben.
Just as importantly we have allowed our education system to become almost solely focused on academic education at the expense of trades, making a large proportion of our male youth feel worthless. For every engineer/architect/designer, we need an army of artisans/mechanics/builders to make what they envisage. We HAVE to start valuing these trades again.
I would not narrow the problem down on the economic aspect though. It is perfectly possible to live in a large Western city, have a well paid respectable (or even prestigious) job and be utterly sexless (ignoring paid-for sex since it doesn’t really solve the problem) and frustrated because of this.
The liberalized sexual and mating marketplace requires radically different skills than that of old, where one guy married one gal and there was a lid to every pot. Most guys grow up without learning these skills and have no clear avenue to do so…
Relationships take TIME, so if your job is an idol, it might help to expand your realm. Young guys may not like to hear recommendations like “Visit a museum”, or “Go to church”, but historically, those are REALLY nice places to meet other people who are looking for something deeper and more meaningful than “sex sex sex”. Bars… great place to hang out… but not the best place to meet women.
This is a great post. I do wonder though if the need to work with their hands and so physical jobs is fundamental or part of the cultural narrative they’ve been raised in? It seems unlikely that we can create enough manufacturing jobs to employ all of these men. Can we instead change the narrative so that these men can take pride in and get self esteem from working in care and knowledge based jobs? And can we do that without forcing them into the middle class mold.
That’s a big ask I know. I once appeared on a panel on how to get into the tech industry for school kids and was dismayed when one teacher just outright said ‘going to uni isn’t realistic for our kids’ in front of them all. These were kids from a somewhat deprived areas. It was incredibly disheartening. Can we convince these kids that knowledge and care based jobs can be for them?
Working in engineering design, a knowledge based sector (albeit manufacturing adjacent), it is possible to show pride whilst retaining working class and masculine attitudes. I can’t imagine care work having the same possibilities as it is still seen as ‘woman’s work’ and doesn’t pay well enough for that to be the source of pride.
It’s not so much that the jobs aren’t there but that they’re no longer valued. As a working class man, I listened with interest to Theresa May’s well-intentioned speech about helping working-class boys. The message was, ‘we can rescue you’, not, ‘we respect you’.
Great comment, I’m stealing and sharing it.
That our intellectuals haven’t a clue about what you’ve said underscores just how ignorant and useless they are.
Sorry James, I think you mean well and are on the side of the angels, but with “Because they wish to work with their hands which might create useful
products instead of writing pointless, subjective articles and their
responses like these”, I think Ben is on to something. To be fair, perhaps one could say the same of Laura Bates, but never having heard of her I can’t say. Abandon over-analysis, get some fresh air, and smile at the next girl you meet.
This is an utter load of nonsense. I truly believe there are men and women and then there are bad men and women and that bad women are simply not as recognised by society as bad men are. The author seems to see the world in terms of women…and the patriarchy. Feminism these days is so toxic I cant even…I havent called myself a feminist for years. Its not a backlash. Its a fight for justice. The dumb figures given for false rape claims make no sense as most men whose lives are destroyed by false rape claims never end up in actual court. They just lose everything because of the online pitchfork mob. From Johnny Depp(Amber Heard actually mocked him, telling him that if he tried to tell the public that she had abused him they would laugh. NB we didnt laugh. we listened. And ignored the feminists) to ytbers like Toby Turner and Andy Signore who lost everything…with not a single report to the police.There are bad women in the world and sometimes those women pretend to be things like social activists.
I simply do not recognise the world described in this article, it bears no relation to the town I live in or my experience.
Feminism never made any sense to me, I’ve certainly had my share of disappointments, unpleasant experiences and coming up against ob noxious individuals (just as likely to be women as men) but for some strange reason I don’t go round blaming men for all of it.
It sounds to me as if this Laura Bates person is making war on men, if you do that on social media, the outcome is bound to be as it is, she, and all the other angry feminists, have only themselves to blame.
How about creating something beautiful, doing something useful or helpful for your community, instead of fighting a war with 50% of humanity ?
Agreed. Only a complete idiot, or a fraudulent ideologue, takes the perceived characteristics of a tiny class of persons, or in some cases the thoughts and deeds of just one individual, and applies them willy-nilly to the whole of society.
Isn’t the theory here that the ‘Manosphere’ is influencing increasing numbers of males? I agree it seems very marginal at the moment. All the younger men I know are well over on the other side, but that may have to do with my political and cultural prejudices. I wonder if anything more is happening than the Internet enabling the women-haters to find one another, just as it has other narrow communities of hatred — to enjoy the same sense of community racists are bathed in every day.
As an explanation of why (some) men hate women, there is The Mermaid and the Minotaur by Dorothy Dinnerstein, which hypothesizes that male children growing up in female-dominated home situations (1950s stay-at-home-Mom families, single mothers, etc.) experience that domination as oppressive, or something like that — the book is not easily summarized in one sentence. You could look it up. One author says it is a “seminal” (not “oval”?) feminist text.
Hi Anarcissie,
“I wonder if anything more is happening than the Internet enabling the women-haters to find one another“.
You’ve made an assumption here which I don’t think is true. Maybe some on the “manosphere” have come to the point where they hate women, but I expect most of them are just massively disappointed that they can’t find a girlfriend and are then told that it is their own fault, and that women are certainly not to blame, and by the way you are have male privilege. Between the ages of 12 – 35, women have all the power excepting the 10% alpha males.
That quote actually isn’t an assumption, but a postulation/question.
I don’t follow… you say that there is male privilege, but that women have all the power? Which one is it?
It sounds to me far more as if Laura Bates (who, yes, is a person) has written a book about one very small subsection of men – something called the ‘manosphere’ – which is a toxic misogynistic internet-based subculture – and not generalised it at all beyond that group.
Apparently Laura Bates is a feminist writer and activist, she set up the Everyday Sexism Project, an online facility where victims can go and share their devastating experiences of sexism, she most definitely is making war on men.
I assume she is also a socialist… who votes for govt (antithesis of “good”) healthcare and feminine men… both of which are bad for women. Self-defeating. As is her “war” on men.
You forgot to mention that she wrote this book without actually having talked to a single person from the “manosphere.” Astoundingly, for a feminist, she gives no mention to the significant number of women involved in highlighting men’s issues.
Janice Fiamengo, Karen Straughn, Elizabeth Hobson, Cassie Jaye, to name a few.
That’s because everything you read on the internet is true. [sarc]
Men don’t hate women.
Women don’t hate men.
Generally speaking otherwise the human race would have died out.
Then it gets complicated, that’s life
I suspect that Laura Bates’ take on male/female relationships will become the accepted truth in the MSM and among the political class ““ with a few dissenters perhaps.
All-woman short lists have given Labour a majority of female MPs for the first time in history (a fact not often mentioned as it does not fit with the woman-as-second-class-citizen narrative).
As femaie power grows men and boys will be increasingly expected to conform to female requirements. Unwillingness to do so will be seen as evidence of an atavistic misogyny which must be eliminated by “re-education”. This may be wild speculation but I think it likely that this “re-training” will fall mainly on the white western male. Feminists know they have always been a soft target.
Yes, but what are female requirements? Like other human beings, women are generally full of variation and contradiction. Many of them (as noted in the review) want men to be manly men sometimes, and pretty femmie at others, and of course what they say they want and what they respond to are two different things, just like everybody else (i.e. men).
Just go to the APA guidelines on working with women and then the one about working with men. There you will soon see what the future is supposed to look like. String women. Weak men.
I smell Joe Biden a mile away.
“Warren Farrell published The Myth of Male Power (1993), in which he argued that men ” not women ” were being systematically disadvantaged by a female-centric conspiracy.”
No.
I found it hard to read past this early paragraph. This misrepresents Farrell and the central thrust of the book.
Agreed, I, likewise did not think that an accurate representation of the book.
There’s no conspiracy. Just ignorance of the power of gynocentrism as force in our culture. This author is typical and unwitting in that.
I was also annoyed that Farrell was portrayed in such a negative way. Did the Author watch The Red Pill before writing this rubbish? I guess not.
Apart from a while after being widowed, I haven’t been celibate for any great length of time since I was 17 (I’m 72 now). Generally, I find that not being an arsehole towards women seems to do it.
I’d hoped this would be a serious article rather than a mass of vague virtue signalling “aren’t these other men terrible or a bit sad” stereotypes thrown randonly at the page.
This article feels like the poisonous, sour fruit of too much time and attention paid to social media. There’s a real world out there, and a real life to be lived, for those who want to give it a shot. Spiteful little groupings and acronyms do nothing but damage. When we point an accusing finger, three of our own fingers are pointing right back at us. Try it.
Similarly, it is important to ask why young men are being drawn to incel ideology.
There’s no where else for them to go. The collapse of the patriarchy in the West, and the consequent ongoing dissolution of our civilisation (which we’re living through) has led to the reintroduction of a pre-civilisational (pre-agricultural revolution) mating pattern based on a minority of alpha men having harems, and with no respected place for the majority of beta men. The feminists have no way of altering this – even if they were to realise what it is that they’ve done.
A lot of truth in that but I think the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s when fornication became the norm for both sexes has a lot to do with it. My dad had it nailed in the 80s when I was a teenager telling me ‘a small number of men are shagging most of the women’. I’m not a natural alpha and I did resent the girls tending to go for the arseholes and then moaning to me about them but I wasn’t prepared to just give up. I worked out, dressed well, became a dj, went to the right places and gradually figured out how to talk to girls. In fact I was doing a lot of the PUA stuff before it was invented and I was reasonably successful with women – certainly more so than the average Joe who (and most women will never understand this) can’t get a snog to save their lives.
You were a lucky teen to have a dad who was able to point that out to ya.
If this is too personal for you to talk about Ullscarf I understand, but was there any other critical details for you that triggered attraction in women to you?
Where do you think the PUAs and broader Manosphere may go right and where they go wrong?
I have wondered if relative attributes among men – height, whether they’re neurotypical or not, looks, aptitudes might affect what approach works for them or not.
I confess that I’ve been blessed with good looks, not film-star but I’ve been told I’m handsome. Some women see me as their type; it’s a matter of taste. I’m 5’9″ and in my twenties used to stuff my shoes when going out, just for a little boost. I’ve always kept in shape. I wasn’t scared to dress a bit outrageously when I was younger. Sometimes people thought I was gay but I didn’t care so long as I was getting the girls. Dj’ing had magnetic properties and frequenting black music night clubs I learnt to move a bit. I don’t know much about the PUA scene or the Manosphere (this article’s the first time I’ve heard the term). I read The Game (by this time in my mid-late thirties) and found the principles worked. I went out and managed a few textbook pickups that would no doubt amuse the pickup chaps. I’ve never been particularly into snogging random women in bars though so better still, I applied the general principles of Mystery Method to online dating, which IMO is a much better way of dating because you can get straight to the women you’ve got things in common with. I copied a woman’s resume from a dating site and had women actually contacting me and I wasn’t stuck for conversation – just kept to the plan. The little I know about the scene is that it quickly went more into the self-improvement realm and that sounds good to me. If men resent women because they can’t, or feel they can’t attract them then I can understand that. I nearly fell into that trap as a young man – maybe in today’s world of Incels I would have done. I’d realised by my early twenties that few women understand what it’s like for the average man. They moan about men being bastards and shagging anything that moves but they fail to realise that it’s the type of man they go for that is like that. The reality is that most men are The Inbetweeners – all their lives! It sounds to me as if the Manosphere are right about the male/female dynamic but this stuff’s been known since the dawn of time. The trick for men is not to get disheartened but get ahead of the pack. That is, after all, what nature intended.
I shall own up to following a lot of MGTOW content. I consider it to be much more positive than Incel PUA or MRA culture. I find it hard to see what’s to complain about in the narrative, which is fundamentally that it’s foolish to put all your hopes of happiness or fulfilment in the finding of a partner, much more productive to concentrate on putting your energy into things you can control and that the more effort you put in, the more reward you can be sure to get out. I don’t think it’s really a radical concept and there’s a very positive message of self-improvement at it’s core. I think the only way it differs from the majority of self-help content is that it explicitly says you are much better served not even having in the back of your mind that the end result of your self-improvement will be a fairytale romance with the woman of your dreams, which I’m afraid to say I think is behind the efforts of a lot of men. If you even have that in the back of your mind you won;t be truly enjoying the things you’re doing just for their own benefit and you are very likely to face dissapointment. It may well be that it’s just a coping mechanism for sexually insecure men, I’m happy to admit to falling in that category, but there are also many men that have had terrible experiences in relationships – who can veer towards misogyny it has to be said, although I think there are probably an equal number of women that spout misandry for exactly the same reason without anyone writing a book about it. However a man gets there, if his personal experience or personality makes a fulfilling romantic relationship very unlikely I think it can only be positive to hear from a group of other men saying that it’s perfectly possible, and in many cases preferable, to live life on your own. There is a massive cultural presumption in film, music and society that the great aim of life is a romantic relationship. It’s easy to become very depressed when you feel your one crack at life is missing what everything around you is telling you is really the only meaningful thing in it, I know I was for far longer than was necessary. If it’s not realistically coming your way – whether that’s because of your own foibles, feminisms impact on society, or some genetic lottery, it’s very positive for a lot of men to hear a different story, and I don’t think this particular corner of the ‘manosphere’ deserves the castigation it regularly receives. We’re just getting on with our own thing.
Good on ya. Aside from PUA and incels, which are their own things, I do think the MRA community has some good in it, though. There’s so many issues so it’s bound to attract a pretty diverse crowd.
Bloody well argued, Jake. There’s not a man on the planet who doesn’t feel as you do for a significant part of their lives. But – bit of advice – save yourself a lot of words. (What’s that saying from Orson Wells? ‘If I had more time I’d have written you a shorter letter’) To me, the clinching proof of the social and philosophical validity of the MGTOW movement is that there would be no lengthy dissertation, justification (or need for self-examination) from women in a visible WGTOW movement. Indeed, a woman espousing the opinions/ideals above would be given a couple of pages in the magazine section of the Sunday paper, ripe for a healthy chat over breakfast in bed with the missus.
No mention of porn? As in the saturation level of it now, and both the utter degradation of women in a lot of it, and the fact that nearly 20% of men under 30 now have erectile problems as a result of overuse?
A lot of hay is made about hatred random anonymous people express on reddit forums. Meanwhile, a tenured professor at Northeastern University argues in favor of women literally hating all men in the Washington Post a couple of years ago, and there is no cultural pushback at all. In wokehadi circles you will never be censured for the hatred toward men you express in elite media, no matter how despicable it is. And yet obscure marginal reddit forums are the real problem apparently.
If the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that men and women hate each other equally.
Not in my world.
Some of us are not prejudiced — we hate everybody.
Mine neither Claire D.
This article has no bearing on the real world. The author is extremely boring (I gave up at the halfway stage) and clearly Laura Bates needs medication.
Along with seemingly 90% of comments below i am keen to point out that fringe gender haters, male or female, are just that and thankfully don’t exist much in our mainstream society. I am not sure they exist much in societies where mysogeny is endorsed by the state (most of the middle east and Africa) or indeed misandry (tiny parts of middle/upper class USA/Canada/Aus/NZ/Northern Europe)
Generalising rarely ends well. Some individual men and some individual women may well hate each other. Men as a sex class and women as a sex class do not. Women as a sex class have valid concerns but it is individual women who resent the pay gap, feel the impact of ubiquitous porn on the way men relate to us, are distressed by rape as a weapon of war and by girls as young as ten being married off to fifty year old men. I have not read Bates but have formed an opinion on the basis of Everyday Feminism. It is a liberal feminism, not the gutsy radical type that got its hands dirty fighting for the rights and protections liberal feminists take for granted today.
Call me old fashioned, but I still like women. I don’t like ‘toxic’ feminism though
More activism run amok. What issues are today’s self-proclaimed feminists up in arms about? There is no profession that is cut off to women. Enrollment at most universities tilts toward female majorities. The professional ranks are full of women. And yet, some act as if they’re living their great-grandmothers’ lives, and they expect to be taken seriously.
This is the thing about activism as a whole – it has no true north at which victory can be claimed. When parts of feminism paint all men as predators, that’s not going to go well. When an encounter between two drunk people turns into a criminal accusation and the person making the charge must be believed – because reasons – that’s not helpful.
Men and women are different. That’s neither radical nor sinister. It’s simply true. Besides, isn’t this author engaging in what might be called “femsplaining”? We’ve all heard of mansplaining, so how is this different.
And their great grandmothers lives were not really their great grand mothers life …
“Do men really hate women?”
A good woman and a good bottle of gin go together like a horse and carriage..
What’s to hate?
I guess some middle class liberals just don’t know how to enjoy life.
Gin? Really? Ugh.
Gin and women – the choice of grown ups.
Both hated by sniveling woke kids.
Is gender not cultural by definition? I don’t understand Bloodworth’s attempt to bring in biology. That’s covered by biological sex.
I`ll never get back the few minutes I`ve wasted reading yet another of James Bloodworth`s wishy washy fence sitting articles. Life is never as simplistic or black and white as he perceives (or as dull as his writing).
I agree the article was woeful, although the subject matter interests me. But fence sitting and black and white seem somewhat contradictory criticisms.
Watch The Red Pill. Read the APA Guidelines for working with women and then the one for working with men. The Western feminist utopia is strong women and weak men. Of course they will complain about those weak men not protecting them from invaders, before joining the invaders.
Men love women. Women love men. Stop spreading hate.
Yes. The Red Pill movie is essential viewing. Don’t let the title deter anyone. Cassie Jaye is the right person to be profiling the men’s movement.
“Manosphere.” What a pithy and deceptive word for a bunch of dim-witted and evil men.
For clarity, I would like to contrast the so-called “manosphere” with true manhood; they are distinctly different.
“Manosphere”- “toxic”, “misogynistic”, isolationist and/or exploitative of women, isolated and short-sighted in their understanding of women, simpletons, haters. There is no “man” about them. Real manhood has been excluded from this man-realm, a twisting of words that falsely includes all men in this slanted alter-construct. Ironically, a minority of men have set themselves apart in this “manosphere” due to a minority of women, “feminists” who show a vile hatred of men and wrongfully discredit the “feminine” title for all women. Hate destructively feeds upon itself.
True manhood. “Men- accept responsibility, deny passivity, lead courageously, and expect the higher reward.” If men have a problem with their masculinity (and many men do), I recommend looking up Dr. Robert Lewis, read about Biblical manhood, and create a plan for their own “manosphere” which actually works. Like many things in CULTURE, men need to learn from a young age about their value and purpose, and about proper behavior and understanding of women. That is far superior to the author’s inferred comparison (last paragraph) that masculinity is akin to “greed and avarice”.
Being a man is great. Being a woman is great. A man and woman together? Even better. Love. Live. Stop hating.
Let’s say there are three “layers” in the west: Gentry, Commoners, and Victims.
The feminist movement is a movement of, by, and for Gentry women. It has visited a murrain on Commoner and Victim women.
And it has demoralized Commoner men and Victim men. Gentry men? Well they can always downsize with a Commoner woman.
All the waffle in Bloodworth’s article in downstream of this reality.
But the basic thing about women is that they expect to be protected. Especially Gentry women.
When men fail to protect women, as in Berlin in May 1945, the women attach themselves to the highest status Red Army officer going. See “A Woman in Berlin,” by Anonymous.
Yep, it ain’t pretty. Sorry about that.
Over a century ago the German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote that men had created the public square for men. And with women entering the public square women would adapt it to suit a “a more feminine sensibility.”
For years, I wondered what that meant. But I now believe that women do not want anything to do with the public square. They want to destroy it and replace it with a safe space. Because women expect to be protected.
This is just as much nonsense. You are stereotyping all women just as feminists stereotype all men.There are normal women/men and “bad” (for want of a better word) women/men. Any growing movement gets hijacked by these people in their eternal search for power. So of course they seem like frightful arseholes. Thats what they are. They dont represent the average woman anymore than Hitler represented the average German.
Any growing movement gets hijacked by these people in their eternal search for power.
Yes it does and in doing so, the movement loses its way. Activism has an inability to take yes for an answer or to claim victory; it exists for its own sake and the aggrandizement of the participants.
Has feminism lost its way? That depends on what its way was. In 1970 it was something radical, an effort to change the surrounding cultural and political economy. By the 1990s it seemed to be ensuring that lots of assistant vice presidents at bank branches be women. Idpol, one of the most effective defense mechanisms liberal capitalism every developed, had kicked in. “We won’t change the game, but we’ll let a few of you girls get in on it.”
Re “the average adult man in England and Wales has just a 0.0002 per cent chance of being falsely accused of rape in a year” … I thought this an unhelpful statistic in this context, especially without the provision of the figure for the per cent chance of being accused of rape in a year. But even more helpful would be provision of the range of estimates of false accusation that are currently out there. (It’s not my field, but, as an example of what a moment’s Googling can do, here’s one from 1996 from the FBI “The “unfounded” rate, or percentage of complaints determined through investigation to be false, is higher for forcible rape than for any other Index crime. Eight percent of forcible rape complaints in 1996 were “unfounded,” while the average for all Index crimes was 2 percent.” Also, though, how confident should we be about these rates?)
I quote….”A few years later, when I started school, my mum lost out on a promotion at work to a man who was significantly less qualified than her for the role…..”
You don’t have to be a woman to discover that life at work can be unfair, unreasonable and that the worst person gets promoted.
That last para said it for me. People’s lived experience contradicts what ideology tells them their lives should be like. The more people are told unequivocally that they and their lives are wrong, the angrier they get. I don’t how this book will help these men to stop hating women (which is what she wants, right?). But perhaps Laura Bates could follow this book up with ‘How Men Can Stop Hating Women And Themselves’?
The function of ideology is to tell you that your life is wrong.
No. Just bates. And feminism.
The Glass Blind Sport is an excellent source of information on this topic.
https://www.youtube.com/cha…
I read this and weep 🙁
We are looking at the same old story Men and Women or Women and Men, whatever way it is the world still spins around. I find it sad that in todays world of information you need to have trouble finding someone. I also see the dating sites as a sorry place to go. Dating isn’t finding sex or is it? Dating to me is spending some time with another person and having a break from the stresses of modern life. God knows how you manage to find time to meet others, when your day is taken up by work, travel and then sleep. Do you simply pick up something on your way home? That’s a joke, before you pop. But I will kindle a version of the book as I am interested. I’m 66 now and remember Cosmo coming out and guys sneeking a peek at the way women think, lol. It gave pointers to some and made some read more. Sex drives are very different and the male 247 is the curse of their lives. Nature makes things ugly at times and in a world where there is so much beauty, some are blind to it.
More activism run amok. What issues are today’s self-proclaimed feminists up in arms about? There is no profession that is cut off to women. Enrollment at most universities tilts toward female majorities. The professional ranks are full of women. And yet, some act as if they’re leaving their grandmothers’ lives, and they expect to be taken seriously.
This is the thing about activism as a whole – it has no true north at which victory can be claimed. When parts of feminism paint all men as predators who must be taught not to rape, that’s not going to go well. When an encounter between two drunk people turns into a criminal accusation and the person making the charge must be believed – because reasons – that’s not helpful.
Men and women are different. That’s neither radical nor sinister. It’s simply true. Besides, isn’t this author engaging in what might be called “femsplaining”? We’ve all heard of mansplaining, so how is this different.
No, but we hate articles about men hating women (or vice versa) and do not read them.
I liked 80s feminism the best: Madonna (before she got weird), Banarama, Kim Wilde, Kylie Minogue, the Bangles etc. Heck, I could even overlook the power shoulders that were the fashion amongst young career women in those days.
Feminism was so much more fun and exciting then compared to the shrill and brittle politicized version we have today. Now women are permitted everything and forgive men nothing.
Sorry that your mother was discriminated against in the workplace because of her sex, James. I hope that things are better now. I really don’t understand what a perceptive writer like you has against Jordan Peterson though. I haven’t read any of his books but his Bible lectures are great. And he has a point about the lobsters. It shows the breadth of his learning that he would bring them into a lecture on the Book of Genesis.
“Manosphere communities assiduously peddle the myth of the bogus rape allegation “when in reality the average adult man in England and Wales has just a 0.0002 per cent chance of being falsely accused of rape in a year.”
Without wishing to sound like an incel, this figure no doubt is using the conviction rate for false rape allegations, which is vanishing low. The police virtually never pursue these cases, even when their own investigations cast significant doubt on the veracity of an allegation it is extremely rare for prosecution to follow.
– Christopher Morley
Women are contemptuous of men they can control.
What a ludicrous article. It should be slanting Bates for projecting her own blatant misandry onto the opposite sex, not taking her at face value.
I have engaged a lot online with the men’s rights movement, and I have seen none of this woman hating the crank Bates talks of. The icons of the movement are nearly all women, such a Karen Straughan, Alison Tieman, Hanna Wallen, Diana Davidson and Janice Fiamengo. Also women like Lisa Chamberlain in this country who are highly respected. And of course not forgetting Christina Hoff Sommers and Camile Paglia. Those women are all revered so I’m not sure who all these misogynists are. The author should really do his own research.
Do men hate women? The very framing is absurd.
This is the kind of topic – like the daft “gender pay gap” topic, that is crying out for some rudimentary grasp of precise language (e.g. careful use of “some” versus” all”) and some numeracy (that is, averages often don’t tell you very much). Do men hate women? All men? Some? Some women? Do some men hate some women? These are rather different questions.
“Men are taller than women.” Clearly true that the average height of men is greater than the average height of women. And, not all women are shorter than all men.
So – hatred… What is meant by “hate”? Some men hate some people, as do some women. I imagine that the number of men who hate all women is minuscule.
Moreover, men who don’t especially want to socialise with most women probably don’t hate women, any more than the men who enjoy the old Page 3, or the men who ‘wolf whistle’.
Adapting Diangelo’s assertions about race to gender – all men hate women and denial is evidence. Expect Male Fragility to become a thing, if it’s not already.
It’s been a thing in the form of ‘fragile male ego’ for a long time. I guess it’s past time for it to go to the next level. Call Robin’s people and get her on it! She need something to power the next wave of corporate workshops.
It is telling that Bates has made a living selling fear to women, fear is a very profitable emotion and women’s more than ever. What is disappointing is how weak the criticism of her nonsense book is.
It is telling that even someone as openly biased as Mr Bloodworth can see it is nonsense.
It is unfortunate that the weak apologetics for the ideas that Bates is trying to pump up appear in this piece. Perhaps one day writers will try an understand what they are talking about but I won’t be holding my breath.
There is so much left out of Mr. Bloodworth’s discussion that I don’t even know where to begin.
First off, it’s easy to rag on incels, even to the extent of considering them a security threat (as the CIA described them stateside and as the “bare branches” problem in China), but no one seems to have given any thought as to WHY there are so many in the first place.
Back in the 70s, feminist critics like Midge Decter told us that feminism was a great deal for men, who could now cat around all they want with no responsibility. What Midge didn’t realize was that only SOME alpha males could do that, and with the degradation of marriage and public acceptance of bastardy, we wound up in a society where fewer and fewer men were having more and more sex. In 1983 Arthur Levine wrote a tongue-in-cheek article for Harper’s, “Sex and the Democrats”, which advocated precisely what Ross Douthat called for more seriously. b*****d children account for 40 percent of US births (much more among the black community), but I don’t know of any source showing how many of those are sired by how few fathers. That would be interesting, but I don’t think the MSM wants us to know. If we had more marriage, the incel problem would abate (although obviously not disappear).
Second, I don’t think any man is making a serious case about a “right to sex”. No one has that right, but the problem is we’ve put up so many institutional and legal barriers that just making the effort has become criminalized for many lower-status men. If you run the risk of approaching a girl at work (even someone not in your reporting chain in a large corporation) you could be accused of sexual harassment and fired on the spot. Ditto the wrong girl in school where you will be expelled for a Title IX violation and forfeit all tuition you already paid.
Third, one can live without getting laid, albeit with a lot of frustration and sorrow, but most of us can’t get by without work. Many incels are quite qualified, but have been squeezed out of the job market by women married to higher ranking men. Can you blame their bitterness when a woman making $60K is married to a man making $200K and getting paid parental leave to boot? This process of “assortative mating” is a factor in growing US inequality, so much so that even the New York Times took notice of it a couple of years ago, and contributes significantly to ultra-high housing costs in regions where it is common (New York, Boston, Washington DC, southern California, the Bay Area).
And finally, the advent of affordable sexbots that would provide some relief for such men has been most vociferously opposed by feminists today. They realize that females can have sex any time they want, and such is the source of their power over men, and they don’t want anything to diminish that power to keep men groveling. That is why the likes of Kathleen Richardson have led the fight against sexbots, and I read somewhere of a suggestion that sexbots be programmed with a module to allow them to refuse sex.
This is what we’re up against. Things better change or more Elliot Rodgers are in our future.
… the real question is : why are women drawn so powerfully, so inexorably to men ?
Misognyny has no scientific basis of any kind: the evidence is of of philogyny ” and misandry. (2018) New Male Studies 7(2), 26-42.
Abstract
No published science paper demonstrates misogyny exists. Data on both implicit and explicit gender attitudes shows males substantially favouring females ““ philogyny ““ or, at worst, gender neutrality. This is hidden by elision with the widernotion of sexism; but there’s no evidence for hostile sexism, and hypothesised benevolent sexism is fatally flawed in operational definition. The mode whereby sexism supposedly causes harm ” stereotyping (stereotype threat) ” has been debunked; likewise inter-sexual dominance, removing any theoretical basis. Possible male harm by control is belied in women being found the controlling party. Misogyny / sexism in being defined circularly is unfalsifiable, therefore non-scientific conceptualisation: ideology itself actually hostile sexism (misandry, which is shown to be real but unseen).